James Alexander
Seriously Selling Services: The 5 Best Practices
It takes Kevlar vests and iron underwear to sell services in a product company—learn the five vital keys to leading this transition. Managing the transition to seriously selling services has an immense upside for most companies. New, profitable revenue streams, more sales of products, higher...
Occasional Brilliance: Good Enough Is Usually Good Enough
Under-promise and over-deliver has a ring to it. Knock-your-socks-off service is a catchy phrase. Flawless consulting has an emotional appeal. What services organization can be against these ideologies? Too bad that they are lousy operating philosophies to run a business by! Here’s why: Over-delivering costs…
Transitioning Your Services Business from Free to Fee
This article is for executives and services leaders in organizations that have given away services to customers in the past and now want to charge for them. Your task is more difficult compared to those who have little history providing services because you have...
For Queen and Country: Reducing Services Giveaways
During the heyday of the British Empire, many a naval blockade or military campaign was launched under the watchword of “For Queen and Country.” Keeping missions at this high level is not only inspirational (very important when facing thousands of tough-looking Zulus), it is...
Seriously Selling to the C-Suite
Only attempt C-level selling when you have competent, credible people armed with unique, value-creating information. Otherwise, stay home. The buyers of services and complex solutions are seldom the same individuals who purchase products. Usually at least one level, and often several levels, above the normal...
Everybody Sells Services
Relying entirely on the product sales force to drive services is not a good idea. Involving your frontline services pros can kickstart seriously selling services. Everybody Sells Everything The title of this article, "Everybody Sells Services," is a vital component of selling and delivering solutions.…
Brilliant Strategy: 4 Paths to Greatness – Part 2
No matter how talented your organization is, if you don’t have the right strategy, you’ll always suffer spotty customer satisfaction, fight problems with morale, and have to live with sub-par performance. My earlier article discussed: The four types of suppliers. The four value potentials. The…
Brilliant Strategy: 4 Paths to Greatness – Part 1
No matter how talented your organization is, if you don’t have the right strategy, you’ll always suffer spotty customer satisfaction, fight problems with morale, and have to live with sub-par performance. This two-part article will help you shape your strategy by better understanding how the...
Services Pro 3.0: The New Corporate Rock Star
Once upon a time...suppliers worshipped their products above all else. Every day...sellers pushed their boxes and gave away services to get the deal. One day...the buyers’ world got more complex, sophisticated, and risky. Because of that...buyers re-prioritized the value in what they bought. Because of…
Services and Strategy: Why Sell Services?
Leading field services in a product company is not for the weak of heart. You must deal with executives who feel that products are the only ingredient in the recipe to organization success and that services are a bothersome, necessary seasoning like garlic in...
Seriously Selling Success: The Evolution of Influence
Is your win rate slower and lower? Is your profitability slipping and dipping? Like an old bull limping through the pasture, it could be that your selling approach once tried-and-true is now out of date and just tired and through. Figure 1 shows the evolution…
Moron Management: Is Your Boss a Dolt?
Really good leaders are tough to find—type in “leadership” on Amazon’s website and 195,206 books pop up. Obviously, with all that written (and more leadership books being introduced daily), no one has yet broken the code on how to find or groom or train...
Brilliant Time Management Practice: Just Say No
The natural tendency of anyone brought up in the services industry is to say yes. Yes, to helping a customer out with something “just a little” beyond scope. Yes, to meeting marketing’s seemingly endless requests for reference account examples. And yes, to bailing a...
Brilliant CS: Pitfalls on the Path to Performance
Most of us are addicted to best practices as guidelines as to how to best turn the crank on the customer success engine. I agree and approve (eat my own dog food). However, from an organizational learning perspective, you will speed your own success by...
Customer Success: The Lost Opportunity
Like driving a high-performance powerboat at idle speed, many organizations only creep along when it comes to piloting customer success—limiting speed, minimizing power, and reducing the chance of feeling the breeze of the winning checkered flag in an offshore competition. Tactical Customer Success What do…
Brilliant Leadership: The Need for Speed
“Looking back over my career, I have never made a tough change that I haven’t wished I had made a year or so earlier.” This confession* comes from Andrew Grove, former chairman of Intel and a person who had faced a tough problem or...
Brilliant CX Tool: Harnessing Hassle
How easy is your company to do business with? Super easy? Crazy hard? Here is a simple, yet powerful tool to find the answer, The Hassle Meter.
You Know You Have Trust When…
Indicators of High Trust So how do you know you have achieved high levels of customer trust? What are the indicators? Here are three: 1. Customers or prospective customers ask for you by name. Customer: “OK, Mr. Salesperson. I will sign the contract on one…
Brilliant Customer Success: Categorize to Prioritize
It is nice to proclaim that you are dedicated to delivering customer success to all customers. However, if your resources are limited (aren’t they always?), the reality is you can’t do it today and you probably won’t be able to do it tomorrow. Maybe...
Brilliant Influencing: Customer Success
How do your customers really define success? As good corporate citizens, I’ll wager they want to help their organizations address its critical issues, be they improving quality or speeding production or lowering costs or whatever the desired business outcomes. When analyzing choices to deliver on...